"It's better if you are present," Miller said, adding she had a hard time finding any past Florida cases where criminal defendants opted to stay in jail while their trials were held. "It's your day in court."

A common rule says you can waive appearance for a misdemeanor trial but not for a felony. Another common rule says if you are present at the start of trial and willfully refuse to show up later, the trial can continue without you.

I would also have used tonto, bobo, pendejo, or estupido so it would reach wider audience of latinos. I have only heard boricuas use it in that manner, calling someone a "drone". I am only thinking of Farks overseas visitors.

mikebdoss: As long as it's not the old guy in "La Cosa es Dura" who's always cheating on his wife or in the bar with the huge-breasted women (on the left here). I love that guy. Anyone know his name?

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If you love that show look for a show called "Latin Lover"

It's a softcore soap opera for men that opens with highlights of last week's sex scenes. (I'm not even kidding)... One saturday morning it was on right before Dora. O_o

TV stations make strange decisions sometime, when I was a kid the local FOX affiliate showed Vietnam the 10000 day war right before the morning cartoons, think that might explain a few things about my childhood.

One of the more useful things I learned just after college came courtesy of the "Spanish" translators we had on Staff in my section of the courthouse. While I didn;t speak Spanish, it got so I could distinguish, fairly easily between her "Mexican", "Puerto Rican", and "Salvadoran" and "Castillian" (She was from Costa Rica but both of her parents were Italian immigrants). It's a lot more than mere dialect, they are almost seperate but related languages

I would also have used tonto, bobo, pendejo, or estupido so it would reach wider audience of latinos. I have only heard boricuas use it in that manner, calling someone a "drone". I am only thinking of Farks overseas visitors.

Yeah, I guess "zángano" is more of a PR/DR thing. And I certainly didn't mean "drone."

And I didn't put an accent over "título" although I meant to type "titular." El café no me hace nada. :)

Google says you just said:Look, sometidor, so you do not look so drone, next time you see a friend who speaks Spanish to translate you the headline. Okay?

so, dude, you really suck at Spanish...

Google doesn't know how to translate subjunctive tenses.

I would have used solicitante or originador.

/Don Francisco is really Lithuanian.

He's a German-Chilean Jew.

Semi-related: La Cuatro (Gloria Benavides) is from a small town in southern Chile called Loncoche, where I used to visit all the time, and grew up in Valdivia, where I used to live. They call her La Cuatro because when Sábado Gigante was a Chilean show, her name was La Cuatro Dientes and she was a stereotypical southerner because they blacked out all but four of her teeth. When the show went international, they didn't want Chile to be represented that way, but she kept her name, minus "dientes."

One of the more useful things I learned just after college came courtesy of the "Spanish" translators we had on Staff in my section of the courthouse. While I didn;t speak Spanish, it got so I could distinguish, fairly easily between her "Mexican", "Puerto Rican", and "Salvadoran" and "Castillian" (She was from Costa Rica but both of her parents were Italian immigrants). It's a lot more than mere dialect, they are almost seperate but related languages

They're like cousin languages, which is a weird concept for English-speakers. I was stuck in the Buenos Aires airport, on my way to Santiago, for 6 hours because of a nasty windstorm. I started talking to this woman and it took me at least 5 minutes to figure out that she didn't have a speech impediment, but was talking to me in "Portuñol." She was from Brazil, near the Uruguayan border at Rivera. We understood each other, but we were speaking a weird hybrid language with Spanish as the lingua franca. Strange, but really cool.

One of the more useful things I learned just after college came courtesy of the "Spanish" translators we had on Staff in my section of the courthouse. While I didn;t speak Spanish, it got so I could distinguish, fairly easily between her "Mexican", "Puerto Rican", and "Salvadoran" and "Castillian" (She was from Costa Rica but both of her parents were Italian immigrants). It's a lot more than mere dialect, they are almost seperate but related languages

They're like cousin languages, which is a weird concept for English-speakers. I was stuck in the Buenos Aires airport, on my way to Santiago, for 6 hours because of a nasty windstorm. I started talking to this woman and it took me at least 5 minutes to figure out that she didn't have a speech impediment, but was talking to me in "Portuñol." She was from Brazil, near the Uruguayan border at Rivera. We understood each other, but we were speaking a weird hybrid language with Spanish as the lingua franca. Strange, but really cool.

Spanish has a lot of connections with all of the Romance languages, so it makes it fairly easy for a native spanish speaker to pick french, or a french speaker to speak portuguese, or italian, and so forth. English, form my experience, get this from German for some reason, but I could be wrong.

One of the more useful things I learned just after college came courtesy of the "Spanish" translators we had on Staff in my section of the courthouse. While I didn;t speak Spanish, it got so I could distinguish, fairly easily between her "Mexican", "Puerto Rican", and "Salvadoran" and "Castillian" (She was from Costa Rica but both of her parents were Italian immigrants). It's a lot more than mere dialect, they are almost seperate but related languages

They're like cousin languages, which is a weird concept for English-speakers. I was stuck in the Buenos Aires airport, on my way to Santiago, for 6 hours because of a nasty windstorm. I started talking to this woman and it took me at least 5 minutes to figure out that she didn't have a speech impediment, but was talking to me in "Portuñol." She was from Brazil, near the Uruguayan border at Rivera. We understood each other, but we were speaking a weird hybrid language with Spanish as the lingua franca. Strange, but really cool.

I learned Spanish in Colombia from my grandmother, who besides being a judge, had a degree in Castillian, and when I returned to the states, I had trouble understanding Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, and Central Americans.

Granny has been very careful to not let me learn or use any slang. But since I live in Florida I now understand everyone, and I am about 95% of guessing what country someone is from.

I got a call from a buddy once in Colombia who asked me if I go to his office to help translate. So I leave work thinking there are some gringos from the US and he needs a little help. Nope, it was a Puerto Rican couple and he could not make sense of what they were saying!